One of our goals was to finish atlassing the proteas. But what is "finished" and how would we know when we had "got there"?

The easiest way to tackle the problem is to keep track of all the new records coming in and when no more come in (or so few as to be negligible), then we will have completed our task. And if we did not finish, then the data should tell us how much longer would be required to complete the task. So how did we fare?

The top graph opposite shows the number of new records (corrected for the number of SRS) per batch run. At the bottom (in squares) is the summary of new records per 1:50 000 series maps. We effectively stopped getting new data by Run 100 – in January 1998. However, at a 12km X 12km grid scale (diamonds) we are still getting one new record per 12 SRS and there is no sign of this tailing off. Indeed it seems to have reached a constant and we cannot predict when we will have reached a "negligible" amount of new data!